Of Peacock’s Tails, Agriculture, and Civilization’s Existential Dangers
Boyd and Richerson (“Culture and Evolutionary Process” 1985:269) posit that adaptive models can only account for limited investment in agriculture, since archaeological evidence shows increase in malnutrition and disease associated with sedentism and greater human densities. So they suggest that in some early farming societies competition between men might explain why intensification could occur.
Does this mean that the eventual development of civilization can be attributed to cultures where internal competition eclipsed cooperative egalitarianism, and politics dominated by self-aggrandizing “big men” steered the economies into ever more ecologically maladaptive directions?
Giving away larger and larger amounts of food, they suggest, exaggerated a sensible indicator trait (generosity) and led to the “runaway” cultural selection that occurred during the Holocene. Due to the tendency for females to prefer mates with higher prestige, runaway cultural evolution might account for extreme production of food surpluses by means of agricultural intensification, even though this did not make sense over long cultural ecological adaption. The extra drudgery paid off, according to this model, because excess food, displayed and given away during competitive feasting events, rewarded winners with prestige contests and that led women to flock to them… or, to put it in the more decorous language of evolutionary biology, these men had “greater reproductive success”.
The eventual development of stratified societies based on agriculture is, therefore, attributed to a feedback between producing food surpluses and sexual selection. Does this mean that the eventual development of civilization can be attributed to cultures where internal competition eclipsed cooperative egalitarianism, and politics dominated by self-aggrandizing “big men” steered the economies into ever more ecologically maladaptive directions?
According to the model, it would seem, agriculture became the cultural equivalent of the point where the tail of Darwin’s peacock ran away with it.
What I actually found when I examined the roles of tribal “big men”, and surplus production in horticultural societies, however, does NOT support their hypothesis.
Let us try some ecological models and acknowledge the fact that the human story does not unfold due mainly through sexual selection and competition between men. Let’s talk about culture as it REALLY does dance a tango with biology.
People cannot see what they not looking for.
I remember in vivid detail the day I learned this. It was during a long series of interviews, as part of my inventory of granaries. This was done to get an idea of surplus food production in each village. All the lineage heads had many more granaries than did individual households, because every household gave a certain amount from their harvest to their lineage heads, and they, in turn, were obliged to pass some on to the village chiefs.
As I was being dragged over a series of enormous structures, in the compound of a village chief, I was thinking darkly about how he was enriching himself by exhorting tithes and extra work from each poor farmer in the village.
The chief turned to me and announced — with a happy sigh: “I have here grain from eight years! I think I frowned at him. I thought — but did not say “…well lucky you.” Then he deflated my bubble of discontent, totally. Because the next thing he said was, “I have enough to feed the whole village now during the next drought!”
“I have enough to feed the whole village now during the next drought!”
Suddenly, I saw him; really saw him. He wasn’t this schemer who had “power” over these poor struggling villagers. He was the focus of all their hopes to survive famine. He was their risk insurance strategy. This tired old guy, who, even as I watched, was fussing over insect damage in one granary and checking for signs of mold and moisture damage; this gruff, gray-haired granddad, was in fact laden with the responsibility and working his heart out to live up to it.
I went back to my tent and looked back over the previous weeks of notes from all these interviews with lineage elders and village chiefs and just had a good cry. I suddenly loved them all very much. It was a major revelation for me. I felt like Saul on the road to Damascus.
Many years after I left West Africa, archaeological evidence turned up from that same region, showing that drought did not interfere with the supply of millet available to villagers in the Sahel hundreds of years ago. The system is real and it was still working when I saw it in the 1980s. That insurance system, so memorably exemplified by my conscientious village chief, worked.
It is not, therefore, coercive power but additional obligation to their community, that best defines what it means to be a “big man” in a tribal society. Lineage systems sent mutual responsibility up and down along either patrilineal or matrilineal lines. The term “first among equal” was embodied in lineage heads standing at the fulcrum where all risks are concentrated.
In most cases, the “buck” stops at the house of the village chief.
If there were rewards for “prestige” they hardly translated into an elevated status that made sexual rockstars of “big men”. That village chief in my example had more wives than many other men, but it was not a measure of his reproductive success, since many of these were political unions. Except for his first wife, the others were all young women who often arrived pregnant. Arrangements for their marriages had fallen through because the male labour drain to plantations in Ghana and the Ivory Coast often meant that young men never returned. Disputes between families over brideprice and breach of contract often landed in the village courts. When the older brother or father of the absent bridegroom would not marry the girl the village chief added them to his household to settle the matter. He married them because it gave the child legitimacy.
Entrusted with careful management of communal surplus food stores, with projects like organizing communal fields to build up stocks after a famine, headman can become more than embodied insurance policies. They are often also instrumental in mobilizing task forces drawn from the whole village, to undertake ongoing cycles of forest clearance, the maintenance of roads, bridges, and irrigation channels. They tend to be agents of social control: hearing disputes between people and assigning penalties to miscreants.
Most important of all, “big men” prevent overuse of the commons.
Most important of all, they prevent overuse of the commons. All of these duties, falling on a few people in each community, confers on them an organizational authority seldom seen among mobile hunter-gatherers. Risks due to conflicts between communities are also managed through a combination of diplomacy and occasional resort to violence. Tribal leadership has, historically, been instrumental in regulating warfare, a process that can result in long-term regional prosperity.[i]
Insofar as they used coercion, traditional tribal leaders enforced rules that permitted sustainable use of the communal resources. These consisted of the village land base, not just the small temporary clearings used for crops, but all the mosaic of secondary growth — the meadows, the shrubby areas where young pioneering trees were becoming established, the patches of more mature forest, and finally small “sacred groves” of old growth forest.
The use of the commons was carefully monitored in direct proportion to the conscientious care taken to enforce strict rules about the use of various wild plants and animals, and of the open grazing land. Most adults in the villages could articulate these rules: infringements were generally handled by lineage heads and, in very serious cases, village chiefs. Over-use, whether by over-grazing, excessive hunting, excessive harvesting of trees (or their fruits), was discouraged by means of public shaming and fines. The conditions that Elinor Ostrom had discovered, which permitted collective management of the commons, were met.
Headmen, thus, may sometimes seem like rulers rather than public servants. But this is deceptive. For individual and households, risks arising from harvest failure, betrayal, interpersonal conflict, accident, fire, disease, or death; as well as for community-wide collective risks, of drought, epidemic disease, volcanic eruptions, severe storms, attacks, raids, and poaching, survival of the community may be down to the conscientiousness of a handful of people. No commercialized insurance companies need apply.
Taboos on over-exploitation — systems of commons management, were a frequent response to increased risks of sedentism, even in hunter-gatherers and it was likely that the tribal systems of lineage corporate groups (lineages, moities, clans) set up a form of leadership based on trust and reputation, that was already partially in place when plant and animal domestication occurred. The original form of agriculture was a form of slash and burn -it was horticultural “forest gardening” of the kind I studied among the farmers of Burkina Faso.
Lineage-based tribal societies, arguably, are organizational outcomes of the kinds of delayed return economies sometimes observed among hunter-gatherers. Such economies developed wherever harvestable surpluses of fish, game, or wild plant food were followed by a dry or cold season of greater scarcity. The domestication of plants and animals was a logial extention of the ecological engineering that hunter-gatherers do, not some sudden invention. Hunter-gatherers are fully aware that plants will grow if they are put in the ground.
The domestication of plants and animals was a logial extention of the ecological engineering that hunter-gatherers do, not some sudden invention. Hunter-gatherers are fully aware that plants will grow if they are put in the ground.
The organizational work in these economies involves, not only timely harvesting, but preparation of equipment, task forces for processing, building of storage facilities, and careful management of outlays over the lean season to make supplies last. The labor-intensive activities were often accomplished by task forces of young people under the direction of elders within kinship units. Instead of individual households being solely responsible for their food supply throughout the year, they are often integrated into extended families and dwell in a cluster of huts or in multi-household longhouses, all sharing a common granary.
In some ways these residential patterns are a direct extension of cooperative risk sharing bands seen among mobile foragers. There is also a similarity with the more prominent roles of leaders during times of larger aggregation in mobile groups. Even the principles underlying sustainable management of “the commons” in many cases appears to reflect cosmologies derivative of the ecologically wise and benign animism of foragers.
People in small scale subsistence foraging, farming, and herding economies tend to see each other through bad patches: bouts of illness, injury, becoming feeble with age, or even being disabled, blind, epileptic, or toothless; none of these are likely to result in starvation or abandonment. Individuals run far greater risks of starvation if they abuse their human relationships and are ostracized. It is better to break a leg or go blind than to lose the trust or respect of family and friends.
Thus, in these economies, risks are collective: one person starving means everyone is hungry
Thus, in these economies, risks are collective: one person starving means everyone is hungry. Food security resides in relationships of mutual trust, and plays out as conscientiousness contributions to a common pool of surplus and general welfare. Significantly, food security also resides in the sustainable management of the common land base, not in the ability of each household to competitively maximize the exploitation of that commons.
Did more intensive agriculture “catch on”, not because it was a way for men to compete for prestige and sex, but because it was a way to deal with increasing risks in caused by population growth? Or, was it an adaptation to increasing population density, as people solved problems like declining soil fertility and more frequent malnutrition and epidemics? Even as manuring, wheeled carts, and ploughing caught on, did the development of permenant land use lead to concepts of land as private property? Did all these changes make inevitable the development of a landless class, poverty, privitization of risk, and hierarchical political leadership? Did more frequent and deadly conflicts break out, between such growing communities, as each one sought more cropland and pasture? Did chiefdomships and kingdoms and empires get started because a few tribal cultures, scrambling to cope with massive negative trophic cascades, opted for wars of predatory expansion? Based on what I learned in West Africa, the answer to all of these questions is “yup”.
Tribal organizations have features that let their leaders bump up their coercive powers by means of “segmentary opposition” via lineage-based kinship loyalties. They can increase the size of their army in direct response to the opposing forces. Where this develops into a whole warfare complex, it can escalate into a systematic plundering of other communities who lack the same level of military discipline and often have fewer lethal weapons than they have farm implements. Communities can band together for mutual protection as well as plunder, of course.
Where warfare is more frequent and intense it takes a lot more organizational planning and tactics to win, and so classes of people who have the time and resources to invest in the best training and weapons tend to become entrenched as a ruling class. Some people even create protection rackets. The older form of leadership, attained through verifiable history of trust-worthy character, therefore gives way to leadership derived from ascribed rank (privilege).
The spotlight drifts to patriotic identification with the divinely sanctioned state and its heroic leaders. The developing military and political elite — whether originating in a pastoral or an agricultural economy, stars in a new spectacle. A supporting cast of specialist military, ceremonial, and business classes, all cluster, well guarded, in fortified staging areas for the pageantry of superior power. In archaeological and historical contexts, these locations are spectacular sets, easily identified by their impressive architecture and monuments. Thereafter, public relations announcements are regularly issued from atop a pyramid created and sustained by social and economic inequality.
Such elites have been known to protect their own positions before offering support for more generalized social welfare, and stressing the superiority of their “citizens” over all others. What we are pleased to call “civilization”; the urbane centres of states and empires, maybe “ultra-social” cultural forms. But the cooperative essence is as old as humanity.
What we are pleased to call “civilization”; the urbane centres of states and empires, maybe “ultra-social” cultural forms. But the cooperative essence is as old as humanity.
Moreover, the methods developed by elites, for extracting the surplus of out-lying regions and food-producing classes, were hardly benign. States do not reduce internal violence because of a eusociality-promoting mutation, “genetic pacification”, some enhanced form of self-domestication, or even because of punitive “big sky-god” religions. The reduction in internal violence happens because political elites impose bans on feuding, murder, witch-hunts, and banditry: all these disrupt productive economic activity and the movement of goods to central markets. This does not preclude continued predatory expansion to take resources from even more distant regions to support ever more over-populated centers.
Are intensive agriculture, ecocide, genocide, large-scale warfare, poverty, self-justifying elites, what happens when humans blunder into an ecological black hole?
Although it is considerably less amusing, I find the ecological black hole more plausible than that runaway peacock’s tail.
References
[i] “…The Iroquois Confederacy was based on The Great Law of Peace and much of those original teachings were adopted and incorporated into The United States Constitution and later into the United Nations. Now is a good time to consider The Great Law of Peace in light of the pressing issues of our day.
The Iroquoian system, expressed through its constitution, “The Great Law of Peace,” rested on assumptions foreign to the monarchies of Europe: it regarded leaders as servants of the people, rather than their masters, and made provisions for the leaders’ impeachment for errant behavior. The Iroquois’ law and custom upheld freedom of expression in political and religious matters, and it forbade the unauthorized entry of homes. It provided for political participation by women and the relatively equitable distribution of wealth.”
— Bruce Johansen, Forgotten Founders….” http://upliftconnect.com/great-law-of-peace/
http://slideplayer.com/slide/8375399/
